By: Eva Keller
Paula Bruno, CEO of Intuition Media Group, says the next competitive advantage in creator marketing isn’t audience size. It’s audience trust.
Follower count is often one of the first metrics brands consider when evaluating influencers. But according to Paula Bruno, CEO of Intuition Media Group, it’s also one of the most misunderstood.
“Follower count tells you how many people someone can potentially reach. It doesn’t tell you how much influence they actually have.”
For Bruno, who founded her agency in 2008, the distinction reflects a fundamental shift in influencer marketing. As brands invest more heavily in creators, the question is no longer simply how many people a campaign can reach, but whether those people trust the person delivering the message enough to take action.
From Audience Size to Audience Influence
Bruno has watched the industry evolve from its earliest days, when brands partnered with mommy bloggers, travel bloggers, and niche online publishers, long before the term creator economy became commonplace.
The platforms have changed. The technology has become more sophisticated. But she believes the industry’s reliance on surface-level metrics has often obscured what made influencer marketing effective in the first place: authentic relationships between creators and their audiences.
Today, platforms provide an abundance of data, including follower counts, impressions, reach, engagement rates, and, increasingly, commerce metrics.
Those numbers are useful, Bruno says, but they don’t tell the whole story.
“You might have a lot of followers, but how many of those followers are true super fans?”
For Bruno, the answer requires looking beyond dashboards and into the communities creators have built. Who is participating in the conversation? Are followers asking questions, sharing experiences, and returning consistently? Does the creator have genuine credibility within the category?
These qualitative signals can reveal something that audience size alone cannot: the strength of the relationship.
The Rise of Micro-Communities
One of the most important developments Bruno sees is the growing value of micro-communities: highly connected groups of people brought together by shared interests, identities, or values.
These communities often form around specific passions, from photography and wellness to parenting, gaming, or financial independence.
And they aren’t exclusive to micro-influencers.
A creator with hundreds of thousands of followers can still cultivate a deeply engaged community within a particular niche. Conversely, a smaller creator may have an audience that rarely interacts or acts on recommendations.
“It’s really depth over breadth,” Bruno says.
In some cases, 10,000 highly engaged followers may be more valuable to a brand than 500,000 passive ones.
The distinction becomes particularly important when brands want to move beyond awareness and influence purchasing decisions.
Within strong creator communities, recommendations can feel less like advertising and more like trusted advice. Members engage in conversations, share their own experiences, and influence one another.
“They’re not interrupting culture. They’re shaping it,” Bruno says.
That is where the value of creator marketing becomes more difficult to capture through traditional reach metrics alone.
Why Audience Portability Matters
Bruno also sees a related shift in how creators think about their businesses.
Increasingly, creators are asking how to build relationships that extend beyond any single social platform.
The uncertainty surrounding TikTok’s future in the United States underscored a vulnerability many creators had already recognized: platforms control distribution, and algorithms can change overnight.
As a result, some creators are building newsletters, paid communities, live experiences, commerce businesses, and other ways to engage their audiences directly.
For Bruno, this introduces another important measure of influence: audience portability.
Can a creator motivate followers to move from a social feed to a newsletter, purchase a product, attend an event, or participate in a community elsewhere?
The ability to carry an audience relationship across platforms and experiences can signal something more durable than a viral moment.
For brands, it also creates opportunities for deeper partnerships with creators whose influence extends beyond a single post or algorithm.
Reach Still Has a Role
Bruno is careful not to dismiss scale.
Large creators can play an important role in building awareness, introducing products, and reaching broad audiences quickly.
But she believes brands need to distinguish between campaigns designed to generate visibility and those intended to drive consideration, engagement, or sales.
A creator who is effective at delivering millions of impressions may not be the same creator who can persuade a smaller, more invested audience to take action.
Neither approach is inherently better. The right choice depends on the business objective.
The mistake, Bruno argues, is treating audience size as a substitute for strategy.
What Brands Should Measure Instead
Bruno recommends that brands begin every creator campaign with clearly defined objectives and KPIs.
If the goal is awareness, reach, impressions, and audience composition may be appropriate measures.
If the goal is performance, brands should place greater emphasis on qualified engagement, traffic, conversions, and other meaningful actions.
But regardless of the objective, Bruno believes creator evaluation requires human judgment alongside technology.
That means reviewing the actual content, reading audience conversations, assessing category credibility, and understanding the relationship between the creator and their community.
It also means recognizing that not all engagement carries equal weight. A comment that demonstrates trust, product interest, or intent may reveal more than a large volume of passive interactions.
“The future really isn’t about reaching more people,” Bruno says. “It’s about reaching the right people through influencers.”
As creator marketing continues to mature, the brands that gain the greatest advantage may not be those that buy the most reach, but those that understand what makes an audience listen, participate, and act.
Because reach tells a brand who might see the message. Trust determines whether that message matters.
